by Simon Bourke
6
The Philliskirks seemed to have successfully negotiated this potentially difficult time in their lives. Sophie had settled in without too many problems, and after some initial misgivings Jonathan was now comfortable with being adopted. The issue of what to tell him had come up sooner than they’d anticipated, but he had dealt with it remarkably well and would surely benefit in the long run. True, they couldn’t shield him from everything, from the Pauls of this world, but as long as they answered his queries honestly and quelled his fears, they wouldn’t have anything to worry about. There had been some slight behavioural changes in the immediate aftermath of his enlightenment; a slight neediness, the constant seeking of reassurance. The books said that was natural, a phase, and just his way of processing the information. In time he would grow out of it. He did indeed grow out of it. He accepted that he was different, that he had come from someone else’s tummy, but understood that he was as beloved and cherished as any little boy could possibly be.
Then came the Family Tree project.
Jonathan was in Year Two now and, according to his teachers, was a studious and attentive pupil. This thrilled Margaret: her boy was an academic. She didn’t want to become one of those pushy parents who put their kids under pressure to succeed, but if he were gifted then it would do no harm to offer a little encouragement. She took a greater interest in his studies, sitting down every evening with him and going over his homework. It didn’t matter that he was only seven years old and that his teachers had merely suggested that he was a good little boy; this was the time to capitalise on his talents. While all the other kids sat in front of the TV watching cartoons, her Jonathan would be brushing up on his arithmetic and his spelling. His spellings were something to behold; he never got one wrong, never. One time he had spelled the word immediately correctly, with little or no prompting from herself. It was remarkable. There couldn’t have been too many seven-year-olds in the country, never mind in his year, who could spell such a difficult word with flawless regularity. His adding and subtracting were exemplary, too; he didn’t even need to use his fingers and thumbs when calculating the more difficult sums. Margaret could hardly wait for Malcolm to get home each evening so she could perch Jonathan up on a chair and have him perform his latest tricks like a circus animal.
Occasionally, when he wasn’t spelling difficult words or naming the ten longest rivers in the world, Jonathan had to do art projects. Margaret wasn’t so keen to help with these. She understood that it couldn’t be all about books and learning, and that he needed to have fun sometimes too, she accepted all of that, and it wasn’t a problem. The problem was that these art projects invariably involved glue and paint and scissors and sticking bits of paper to things. The project itself took a few hours to complete, but the clean-up operation lasted for weeks. It had reached the stage where it was easier for her to do the projects all by herself; it was quicker and far less messy. When Miss Jones asked her Year Twos to complete a family tree, Margaret was eager to assume control; but this particular project posed larger problems than how to get paint out of one’s hair.
“Jonathan’s got to do a family tree for school,” she mentioned to Malcolm one night, when the children were in bed.
“Has he?”
“Yes. What do you think we should do?”
Malcolm pondered this for a moment. “Well, I know he doesn’t like my dad, so maybe he could leave him out.”
“Malcolm, I’m serious,” she replied. “This is bound to raise some questions.”
Her husband reluctantly moved his eyes from the TV. His selfish side told him that he worked long hours to provide for his family and that someone else should deal with stuff like this. He knew that was wrong, though, and how hard it was for his wife. Besides, he wanted to have as much input as possible in his children’s lives.
“Everything raises questions, Marge,” he replied.
“You know what I mean, Malcolm. What if he asks about her, and wants to put her on his family tree?”
The idea terrified Margaret. What would they call her: the other mother? His birth-mother? And more to the point, where would they put her? In the middle of the tree, with Margaret relegated to a lesser spot on one of the outer branches? What would the other kids say when they saw Jonathan’s tree? It’d be like Paul all over again, except that this time there would be an entire playground of baying children instead of just one.
But the thing she feared most was giving this other mother a life. At the moment she was alive only in their imaginations, but if she were to be immortalised in a family tree, she would become very real. They knew little about her, only that she’d been young when she’d had him – in her teens – and that she wasn’t from the area. Her details were on file for Jonathan when he was older, but for now they were happy to remain ignorant.
“I don’t think he will,” Malcolm said decisively.
“Why not?”
“He’s seven years old, Marge. Kids that age don’t think about stuff like that.”
“But what if he does?” she persisted.
“Well, if he does and he wants to put her on the tree, then we’ll have to let him put her on the tree.”
This wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She wanted her husband to take her side, to see how damaging this could be for their child’s development, but she also wanted him to understand how much it would hurt her.
“What if he wants to put his birth-father on there too?” she asked spitefully.
Malcolm shrugged his shoulders, but she could see he didn’t like the idea, didn’t like it one bit.
“Look,” he said, holding his hands up to signal a truce. “This is just the beginning. The older he gets, the more questions there are going to be. Our job is to answer those questions, and make sure he understands why he was adopted and what it means for him. Unfortunately, our own feelings don’t come into it.”
He was right, of course. Now that they’d opened the floodgates, there was no turning back. They had to answer every question and be as honest and as forthright as they possibly could. She didn’t want her son to have issues when he grew up or to harbour grudges against them, to become one of those problematic teens whose troubles stemmed from a difficult childhood.
“Okay, Malcolm, you’re probably right,” she conceded. “I’ll have a chat to him about it when we’re doing the chart tomorrow.”
“Great,” Malcolm said, turning back to the TV.
Newsnight was just about to start. Perfect timing.
*
“Mum, where’s the Pritt Stick?”
Margaret looked at Sophie in desperation. Sophie stared back casually. Don’t ask me, my job is to just sit here and be cute. There was no avoiding it any longer. Her daughter had been fed, changed, sang to, played with and burped. If only she’d been one of those cranky babies that cried at the drop of a hat. Not Sophie though; she was as good as gold. Little Miss Perfect.
“Wait a minute, Jon,” she shouted. “I’ll get the stuff ready now.”
Jonathan had grown tired of waiting. She’d been putting him off for an hour and he was fed up, so he’d started by himself. He’d collected all his crayons and paints, and found some sheets of paper in his dad’s study. But that wasn’t enough. He needed more stuff. So he’d tipped out the contents of his big toy-box, and discovered that he could still fit inside it despite being two years older now. For a while he stayed in there, hidden, laughing away to himself, hoping his mum would come looking for him. Then he remembered why he’d emptied the box in the first place, and set about sifting through the pile of old toys and various junk he’d left in the middle of the floor. He found some great stuff: Skeletor’s head, which he’d presumed lost; one of his favourite toy cars, which he’d blamed Phillip Clegg for taking; and loads of old toys that he’d completely forgotten about. He found an old colouring book which had only been half-finished, so he fetched his
crayons from the kitchen and busied himself with that for a while. It was only when he’d finished colouring in some trees that he remembered his project, realising with fevered excitement that he could take the page containing the trees and stick it to another, larger page.
He stood in the kitchen holding his colouring book, spying the scissors and wondering if he could use them unchaperoned. His mum was rummaging through the cupboards, she wouldn’t notice. He inched toward the scissors, keeping an eye on his mum all the while. But then she pulled out a bright red shopping bag. He hadn’t seen that before. It looked new, as if she’d bought it this morning.
“What’s in there, Mum?” he asked, hoping that the answer was sweets.
Lifting the bag onto the kitchen table, she said, “This is the stuff for your project.”
“But I’ve nearly finished the project, Mum. Look!”
He held up the colouring book and the sheet he’d been working on for her perusal.
“Hmm,” Margaret said, surveying his work. “This is all very good, Jonathan, but I think we can do a better job.”
“Are you sure, Mum? I coloured it in really well,” he said, pushing the sheet closer to her face in case she hadn’t seen it properly the first time.
Margaret made a big show of examining the green and brown blobs on the paper, before shaking her head and leaving the sheet to one side.
“Come on, Jonathan, let’s start again.”
“Okay, Mum. Is Sophie going to help us?”
“I don’t think so,” Margaret said hurriedly, envisioning a paint-streaked baby with her hands glued to her face. “She’s fine where she is.”
“Okay then, Mum, let’s get started,” said Jonathan, peering inside the bag to see what he had to work with.
Margaret knew that the biggest obstacle to the project’s completion would be Jonathan himself. His projects usually went something like this: She would come up with an idea, a general plan for how the project would take shape. Jonathan would say that this was a fine plan, and offer up his services in whatever way they might be needed. She would assemble all the things needed for the project: scissors, sticky tape, empty toilet rolls, pens, markers and so on, and Jonathan would immediately begin working on something else, his own mini-project. Happy to work without interference, she would get to work on the project and, despite herself, actually start to enjoy it. Jonathan, seeing that her project was better than his, would then butt in and start suggesting she do things differently. She would accede to some of his more reasonable requests, but flatly refuse a complete overhaul. Jonathan would then act as a willing helper for all of five minutes before declaring himself bored, leaving Margaret to complete the project by herself.
Once, just to see what would happen, she had let him dictate things and run the project by himself. The project in question had involved the solar system and the alignment of the various planets. It started off quite well; the sun was placed in the middle of the chart, Earth nearby and the moon at a reasonable distance from both. Then things went slightly awry. The moon began to grow, becoming bigger than the sun, so that he could draw a little face on it. Then several spaceships were sent out into the Milky Way for signs of life; a great battle ensued between mankind and an unnamed alien species. These aliens had technology superior to that of their human counterparts and before long Earth was under attack, the future of humanity in serious doubt. By the time Jonathan declared himself bored Earth had been completely destroyed, and none of the other planets had seen the light of day. From that day forth, Margaret had decided that all projects would be tackled as a team. In other words, she would complete them while he watched.
“Okay, Jonathan, what do you know about family trees?” she asked, laying out an A2 sheet in the middle of the table.
Jonathan thought hard. He’d been told about this in school, but he was too excited to remember it right now. He loved doing projects with his mum, but he didn’t like having to remember things from school.
“It’s something to do with Nana and Granddad,” he said finally. “They’re at the top of the tree and I’m at the bottom.”
“Very good, Jonathan, that’s exactly it.”
“Is it?” he asked, surprised.
“Yes. Your family tree is all the people in your family, from you to me and your dad, right up to your grandparents or even farther back.”
Jonathan fell into silence while his mother began cracking open packets of crayons and stickers. She’d had a stroke of luck that morning when she’d come across a sticker-book asking her to Create your own magical forest full of birds and other wildlife. Oh she’d be creating a magical forest all right, one so magical, so full of birds and other wildlife, that her son would receive an array of gold stars from the blissfully unaware Miss Jones.
“Mum, I really don’t get this.”
“How do you mean?”
“The whole tree thing; what does it mean?”
He looked at her earnestly, awaiting the answer that would explain everything. Margaret had never considered the concept of a family tree before and was at a loss; Jonathan’s questions often left her considering things she’d never really thought about before. And this particular question was the most difficult kind to answer, because it dealt with the abstract; there was no actual tree involved, but it was still called a family tree. In scenarios like this, she found it best to improvise.
“Our family tree is the one in your nana and granddad’s back yard.”
“The big yellow one?”
“Yes,” Margaret replied.
He stared into space, lost in thought. He’d been in that back yard lots of times; there wasn’t much to do at Nana and Granddad Philliskirk’s, so he often spent hours out there making his own amusement. He’d tried to climb that yellow tree on numerous occasions, but he couldn’t even reach its lowest branch
“So we’ve got to draw a picture of the tree in Nana and Granddad Philliskirk’s back yard, Mum?”
“That’s right, Jonathan.”
“And that’s it?”
“No, then we have to put all our family into the tree.”
“Like monkeys, Mum?”
This was hopeless. She could spend hours trying to explain it to him this way, and he still wouldn’t get it. She decided to change tack.
“It works like this, Jonathan – imagine all your family: me, your dad, your sister, all your cousins ...”
“Uncle Tony?”
“Yes, even Uncle Tony. We’re all one big family, and the only way for us to keep track of one another is to draw a big tree with all our names on it. Then when you want to remember whose mum is who, or whose brother is who, you just look at the picture of the tree.”
He nodded, seeming to understand.
“Am I on the tree, Mum?”
“Yes; it’s your tree, so you’re in the very middle of it.”
“Wow! Can I put a tree-house in it?”
“Of course. We just have to draw it first.”
“Great. Me and Tony will be in the tree-house, anyway,” he said primly, picking up a crayon and pulling the sheet towards him.
She began to protest, indicating the sticker-book with all the lovely pictures of trees, the oaks, sycamores and horse-chestnuts, but it was too late; he’d already begun drawing what she presumed was himself and his uncle sitting in a tree, but could just as easily have been a continuation of the assault on Earth by the alien forces who had blighted their last project.
Margaret discreetly pulled out another sheet and got to work by herself. None of the stickers was big enough to use, but inside the book was a picture of a tree that fitted her purpose perfectly. She placed the sheet over the book and traced the tree onto it. It looked good, too good to fill in with a marker or a crayon. What she needed was something that would stand out, something that would put all those other seven-year-olds to shame. Sh
e rummaged through the bag, but nothing there helped. Then an idea struck her, something that would have Miss Jones gasping in awe and Jonathan placed at the very top of the class. She would go into their back garden and collect some leaves from the trees, then stick them to the page with glue. Then she would get a knife, strip some bark from the branches and use that for the tree-trunk. It would be incredible.
But she looked at the mess they’d already made, and then outside, at the drizzly April afternoon, and decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Instead she would get all Malcolm’s old National Geographic magazines and cut pictures of trees out of those. It would end up as a collage of sorts. Most of Jonathan’s classmates probably didn’t even know how to spell collage.
By the time she’d finished, the notion of explaining how family trees worked had become secondary. She’d been so engrossed in her work that she’d hardly even noticed Jonathan slip out of the room. Stepping back to take a look at her work, she cooed in admiration; it was quite something. If only she’d been this dedicated during her own schooldays.
“JONATHAN, what are you doing?” she called. “Come and take a look at this.”
He padded in from the sitting-room and re-joined her at the table.
“Look at mine first, Mum,” he instructed, pushing his work towards her.
She peered over for a look. True to his word he had drawn a tree-house, and it looked like he and Tony were inside. They appeared to be playing football, and there were no other family members in sight; just a great big tree with two people sitting inside it. There was no sign of herself or Malcolm, unless it was they who were lying on the ground outside the tree-house with blood pouring from their heads.
“Who are those people, Jonathan?”
“Oh, that’s the Cleggs. They tried to get into the tree-house, but me and Tony kicked ‘em out.”
“Please don’t ever do that to the Cleggs, Jonathan.”
“If they try to get into my tree-house I’ll have to, Mum.”
“Why don’t you take a look at mine for a minute, Jonathan?” she suggested, shifting her work towards him. “What do you think?”